''Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape'' is a 1975 book about

rape Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or ...

Susan Brownmiller Susan Brownmiller (born Susan Warhaftig; February 15, 1935) is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book '' Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape'', which was selected by The New York Public Library as o ...

, in which the author argues that rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Summary

Brownmiller criticizes authors such as

Richard von Krafft-Ebing Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 14 August 1840 – 22 December 1902) was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work '' Psychopath ...

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts ...

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

, and

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ,"Engels"
'' Clinton Duffy and others. She discusses rape in war, challenges the Freudian concept of women's rape fantasies, and compares it to the gang lynchings of African Americans by white men. This comparison was used to show how lynching was once considered acceptable by communities, and then attitudes changed, followed by changed laws; Brownmiller hoped the same would happen with rape.

Reception

''Against Our Will'' is credited by some with changing public outlooks and attitudes about

. It is cited as having influenced changes in law regarding rape, such as state criminal codes that required a corroborating witness to a rape, and that permitted a defendant's lawyer to introduce evidence in court regarding a victim's prior sexual history. Mary Ellen Gale wrote in ''

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

'' that ''Against Our Will'' "deserves a place on the shelf next to those rare books about social problems which force us to make connections we have too long evaded, and change the way we feel about what we know." It was included in the "Women Rise" category of the New York Public Library's Books of the Century. The critic

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (June 14, 1934 – November 7, 2018) was an American journalist, editor of the ''New York Times Book Review'', critic, and novelist, based in New York City. He served as senior Daily Book Reviewer from 1969 to 1995. Bi ...

gave the book a mostly positive review in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', noting that Brownmiller "organized an enormous body of information into a multipurposed tool" that gave a program for modernizing rape laws while considering the treatment of rape in war overly detailed and numbing. Others have taken a more critical view of the work. Gay scholar

John Lauritsen ''The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein'' is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, which defends the unorthodox hypothesis that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of '' Frankenstein; or, The Mode ...

dismissed ''Against Our Will'', calling it "a shoddy piece of work from start to finish: ludicrously inaccurate, reactionary, dishonest, and vulgarly written."

Angela Davis Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A feminist and a Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of ...

argued that Brownmiller disregarded the part that black women played in the

anti-lynching movement The anti-lynching movement was an organized political movement in the United States that aimed to eradicate the practice of lynching. Lynching was used as a tool to repress African Americans. The anti-lynching movement reached its height between t ...

and that Brownmiller's discussion of rape and race became an "unthinking partnership which borders on racism". Brownmiller's conclusions about rapists' motivations have been criticized by the anthropologist

Donald Symons Donald Symons (born 1942) is an American anthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. He is one of the most cited researchers in co ...

in ''

The Evolution of Human Sexuality ''The Evolution of Human Sexuality'' is a 1979 book about human sexuality by the anthropologist Donald Symons, in which the author discusses topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, at ...

'' (1979), and by

Randy Thornhill Randy Thornhill (born 1944) is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his ...

and Craig T. Palmer in ''

A Natural History of Rape ''A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion'' is a 2000 book by the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig T. Palmer, in which the authors argue that evolutionary psychology can account for rape among human be ...

'' (2000). The historian Peter Gay wrote that ''Against Our Will'' "deserves pride of place among (rightly) indignant" feminist discussions of rape, but that Brownmiller's treatment of

is unfair. The critic

Camille Paglia Camille Anna Paglia (; born April 2, 1947) is an American feminist academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern cultu ...

called ''Against Our Will'' well-meaning, but nevertheless dismissed it as an example of "the limitations of white middle-class assumptions in understanding extreme emotional states or acts." The behavioral ecologist John Alcock writes that while Brownmiller claimed that no zoologist had ever observed animals raping in their natural habitat, there was already "ample evidence" of forced copulations among animals in 1975, and that further evidence has accumulated since then. In 2015, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' described this thesis as “startling,” and called ''Against Our Will'' a “convincing and awesome portrait of men’s cruelty to women.”

References

External links

* {{authority control 1975 non-fiction books American non-fiction books Books about rape English-language books Feminist books Radical feminist books Feminism and sexuality Second-wave feminism Simon & Schuster books